Below is a piece of correspondence submitted (and rejected) to Nature.

Being weighed, measured and still found wanting
The recent editorial in, “Do Scientists really need a PhD?” (Nature, 464, 7; 2010), suggests a relatively novel approach to higher learning than is traditionally accepted in western nations (in light of some measures in China). The editorial characterized this as the title implies, but more specifically as an “increasing rigidity and length of Western academic pipeline”, in light of possible progressive alternatives currently offered by Beijing Genomics Institute.

What the editorial did not consider, which is in lock step with any research program, regardless of Eastern or Western, is ‘Where is the money coming from?”, and more specifically, “Who is going to judge an non-traditionally trained researcher and his/her proposal, against one that is support by a PhD?”

Our academic culture is one of steps on ladder, rather than one of an apprentice in a guild. Funding agencies, whether NGOs, provincial/state, or national, almost certainly have the PhD stipulation, implicit, if not implied for any applicant. As one who has not been formally trained but has modestly made some contributions in my field, and as head of my institutional program, this is a perpetual quandary. Though I have recently found an adjunct alliance with a moderate size university (again, the larger ones wouldn’t even consider this possibility), this still does not allow access to any of these traditional funding sources. What is hoped is that some organizational leadership evolves where the practice of science is determined on the demonstrated history and the reasonably expected results.

Commentary: The Planned, the Intended, and the Real.

To provide apologies at the beginning of an essay is not standard, yet, the circular, elongated route I am taking may seem extreme. But imagine that the stray path, though requiring more time, also provides a dynamic, unexpected vista, making any detour seem worthwhile.

Imagine a world where smog and other pollutants filled the air and your lungs. Where dampness was a year round infliction; your living space like moist, cobbled cells. You were free but only in a state of mind. The labor you endured was tortuous. The sewers were the streets you walked along. This was a time when a medical man like Peter Roget had to create mental barriers for his own survival as he applied his trade amongst the less fortunate class. His belief in the good of all man was complicated by his own crippled mental, privileged state, expressed in what one would today call OCD – obsessive, compulsive disorder. But the early 19^th century England would have viewed Peter as only odd, in service for the betterment of man.

Peter had a lively medical practice, but with a scientific mind, sought causes of some of the common maladies he saw living in a class state, where factory workers in the industrial areas were over flowing. This was the contrary of a typical medical man at the time, where practice alone brought in financial security. Not tinkering with ideas. As a practical approach, he worked with the public health causes, calling for improved personal hygiene, airier living quarters, to which to a larger populace, in sorts, perceived him as a righteous sort.

As stated, Peter was a man of science. Early 19^th century allowed men of scientific training (or of a priestly background) to wander between disciplines of knowledge, from botany to zoology, to geology, to politics, to literature. He was a man of training and knowledge. A privileged place indeed. He was a strict follower of Linnaeus, the cataloguing of nature who created the binomial classification we still use today. Homo sapiens, italicized with capital at the genus Homo, and sapiens the species. “I classify, therefore, I am” he once wrote in his youthful period. This would seem a reasonable expression considering his OCD. Besides, the study of natural history, in its more scientific rather than theological genre, was just beginning. Always ready for a thought, one day he observed a horse drawn cart roll by his vertical slat-shaded basement window. The wheels' spokes seemed distorted through the blinds as the cart moved on. Curious, he ran out of his house, paid the driver a few coins to continue back and forth in front of his windows at different speeds. He was noting how the eye, specifically the retina sees still images as a continuous picture moving. He notified the scientific elite with a publication, “Explanation of an Optical Description in the Appearance of the Spokes in a Wheel as Seen through Vertical Apertures,” which immediately drew the attention of other scientists. What Peter described was the theoretical structure of what we would later call motion pictures. The movies.

What is thought as a life achievement in ones own time, history may have other plans. Peter’s major work in science was the contribution to a series of very popular books call the Bridgewater Treatise. These were to describe the works of God as seen through the natural world. Peter’s contribution, summed up in two volumes, was the physiology of animal and plants. It was a best seller in the 1830s where a hungry population were eager to learn, and explain the wonders of nature in light of reveled religion.

But history has an odd way of twisting the final outcomes of a life, for Peter was no singular man. His psychosis was strong, heavy on the anxiety from the time of a child. Some of his immediate relatives had deep psychological issues that were manifested in Peters own home environment. His relationship with his doting mother was abhorrent. To save himself, to finally have moments of sane control over his life, he secluded himself writing lists of words. Organizing and comparing them. We would call these a list of synonyms, words that have similar meaning. Throughout his life, in small packets of time, he would add to this growing list for practical, almost therapeutic purposes. “The process of verbal classification” he once wrote “is similar in principle to that which is employed in the various departments of Natural History.”

After a successful career in medicine, his retirement brought further anxiety. Idle hands were not his habit. With some nudging by his family, he dusted off his list of words, thousands in total, and began further organizing them, not just for personal distraction and play, but for actual publication. Published in 1852, Thesaurus of Words and Phrases by the author, Peter Roget first entered the populace. As one biographer noted, “Roget looked to words as an essential tool in the fight to advance human knowledge”.

The 21^st century has come to know Peter not for his dedication to medicine or science, or even the instigator of the movies. But for his thesaurus. Though still in in print, with numerous editions, history has not been so kind to Roget. Some critics today find the thesaurus, and all its versions and types as cheats to the English language. “It brings words to the mouths … where words were not earned by a breadth of reading.” Further, the substituted words provide “no context, [a] standard requirement of intellect.” As an earlier critic wrote, the thesaurus “accelerates the tongue without accelerating the faculties.”

Still, the thesaurus persevered, but only for one reason. It's usage was ‘accelerated’ thanks in part to New York World newspaper in 1913 with a game called “Fun”. Fun was the precursor to the crossword puzzle. And here, the thesaurus became almost essential as the game spread across North America, and elsewhere.

Critics of the Peter Roget’s thesaurus in the 1850s were already ringing the alarm bells, however. An American essayist, Edwin Whipple believed that this book of synonyms “was certain to spread contagion of literary mediocrity” by shortening the act of naturally acquiring language and words. Securing the “results without imposing the task of labor.” Whipple saw the cheat right away.

And here comes the end. In an austere, progressive, humane world today, with all the possibilities of learning and acquiring knowledge through digital means, or at least the allusions we have about how great we are with our digital media, what would Whipple think of the internet? Despite infecting all of the current generation and most of us in the earlier segment of life, with EVERY need, want, and desire, the internet as an educational tool has a failing grade. At least according to the numerous surveys and studies. It provides access to almost everything….and almost no one is using it in this fashion. It provides texts and studies, yet most users go for the crib notes. It provides an avenue for short cuts, without the act of reading the sources themselves [the cut and paste generation as I call it]. And as many studies have shown, hasn’t helped our children learn [comparative assessment of grades and reading skills of today compared to 20, 30 years ago have remained the same, if not fallen].

If this sounds like an old curmudgeon blowing his horn about days gone by, listen to the more youthful J. J. Abrams, film producer of TV shows like LOST, and the latest STAR TREK movie. “Earning the end game”, the short cuts, whether computer games, or in life, “seems so yesterday, especially when we can know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it” [emphasis mine]. Peter Roget’s thesaurus was meant to provide structure to the English language. Its usage was then twisted for the easy way out, of amplifying ones knowledge and intellect when there was less so. In parallel the digital age of options, “aps”, and solitary social media is to me, somewhat striking.

TTT

"The Man Who F rgot How to Read", by H. Engel

"The Man Who F rgot How to Read" is a surprisingly even tempered, unemotional memoir of a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia - the ability to still write but would almost immediately forget what he or she wrote or read. Compounded, the author, Howard Engel is, by profession, a writer (if something like this could be compounded in any profession).

Its hard not to wonder, 'if that were me', how emotional and angry the natural reaction would be. Engel too said as much but maybe by maturity he was able to find alternative routes to the same ends; It probably says more about my own immaturity. "I was beginning to feel like an eunuch in a harem" he once thought, working with authors and writers before he himself finally put pen to paper creating his own novels. "I saw the trick done every day, but I wasn't doing it myself". But then to have this happen later in life would have been almost unbearable to most. But Engel's stoic determination can only be marvelled at.

This memoir travels through much of his time up to, during, and the recovery of from his stroke. Alexia by definition is "word blindness" which seems somewhat counter-intuitive "for one thinks of reading and writing as going together...that someone should be able to write" and read what they have just written. The the brain is a funny piece of hardware, illustrating that something we take for granted as operating in sync with each other, actually uses different parts of the brain.

As a source of inspiration "The Man Who F rgot How to Read" is essential reading for anyone who may for a moment takes for granted what may seem like a natural, air breathing exercise for the bibliophile.

No. 0885

"Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus" by J. Kendall

"There really was no such thing as a synonym, because no two words can mean exactly the same thing" Tell that to Peter Roget, the early 19th century polymath. Kendall's biography elucidates a life that, like the proverbial cat, had many lives. Successful doctor, public health reformer, inventor, scientist, and as we know him today, a creator of list.

We would also refer to him, if we were to dig a little deeper as Kendall has, as one who was afflicted by OCD - obsessive compulsive disorder. Whether by nature or nurture, certainly the latter had some influence. With a family who suffered from neuroses and psychosis, his excessive doting mother caged Roget almost since birth. "Burying himself in words was the only survival strategy available to him", Kendall notes. His escape was making lists of words, even as a young child. "I classify, therefore, I am" was his childhood motto.

As a man of medicine, thus with some privileges in a society of quasi obedient social structure, he fought for the humanity and future of the people he served, ensconced in a pollutant, poor, industrial state. Personal hygiene, and clean quarters, were of some practical utility that we would take for granted today, and public need, which Roget would preach. Meanwhile, nature and science, in his day called "natural theology", formed the basis of further classifying and study. So much so, he was asked to contribute to the serial publication of the Bridgewater Treatise; a collection of summations of science, for the glory of God. This was a time when science was edging in on the morals of theology. "He simply could not abide by the new paradigm" Kendall states "in which God was becoming increasingly irrelevant." His writings were very successful, and if one were predict history's final outcome, this volume would be a likely candidate.

However, time and history have a way of choosing it's own personal trait. After leaving medicine, retirement for one so prone to anxiety and fear of idle mind and hands, Roget momentarily struggled for his own fate. By mid-19th century in a glorious, proud nation like Great Britain created a populace that were hungry for learning. Literature and its structure, were amiss with theory and discord. Dictionaries and useful guides like a book of synonyms were cheap, and unsatisfying. They weren't consistently critical and structured. Urged on by family Roget dusted off his book of lists, something toyed with over his life, and spent several months refining the eventual treatise we come to know as Roget's Thesaurus. The stated purpose: "The appropriate terms, notwithstanding our utmost efforts, cannot be conjured up at will. Like "spirits from the vasty deep," they come not when we call."

Though successful in his time, the thesaurus was a regional volume. American editions popped up that sliced and diced the English to appease the American taste for language. But the thesaurus never took off until years after Roget died. In 1913 a New York newspaper created a game called "Fun". We would know it today as the first crossword puzzle. And as any crosswordian knows [I am sure there is some, single creation in the Oxford English Dictionary for one who is, if not addicted to the crossword, a 'professional' at the crossword. If they have come up with a word for those who create these puzzles - a cruciverbalist - then dam it, there should be one for the the addict who fills in little white boxes using a pen no less], one of the essential tools of the not so pure form of doing crosswords is the use of a thesaurus.

Biographer Kendall has dug deep into the life and lives touched by Roget. I was so enamored by the man (as I am with most polymath's) that the included references were gone over with a fine tooth comb. So much so, I wrote an essay based mostly on Roget's life for a local 'weekly' which I hope to post after it is published in the upcoming week or two.

No. 0868

Evolution Education Outreach journal

Evolution: Education and Outreach will promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience. Targeting K-16 students, teachers and scientists alike, the journal will publish articles to aid members of these communities in the teaching of evolutionary theory.
For now at least, all the articles are accessable FREE.

Purpose-driven life: evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/spring-2009/

Evolutionary thinking has lately expanded from the biological to the human world, first into the social sciences and recently into the humanities and the arts. Many people therefore now understand the human, and even human culture, as inextricably biological. But many others in the humanities--in this, at least, like religious believers who reject evolution outright--feel that a Darwinian view of life and a biological view of humanity can only deny human purpose and meaning.
Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose. ....

A Readers Summary

Since August, 30th, 2009, I have been rather busy. I have taken on new challenges, some I've been hoping for a shot at for a long time. Busy, of course is a relative term. We are all busy. But we each have loads we hoist on our shoulders that challenge us more so than the day before. We are all Atlas's. Sometimes its worth noting that as we heave the world on our shoulder....nearby, there are 6 billion other worlds being held on respective shoulders.
That said...I haven't forsaken my mental food. The following are just brief snippets of tomes consumed for the betterment of my own health.
Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian [No. 869], is as the title claims a series of letters. Written to a hypothetical young mind who is in want of path of reasoning. And in our world of spin and victorious history writing . "One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled" Hitchens professes "to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others." And if one has ever read a Hitchens volume being the antagonist is something he seeks, for as he aptly puts near the end of this little volume: "Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.
Dan Brown's much anticipated sequel to The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol [No. 870], is a let down. Possibly because of exactly that, that it was much anticipated. A sad reality of success. Let's hope that his next one will be more original. Not much can also be said of Claude Izner's Murder on the Eiffel Tower [No. 871]. Suckered in by a bookseller involved in a murder mystery, I was sorrily disappointed in this little tale set in the late 19th century of Paris, France where murder is afoot in a poisonous sort of way. Not even the scenery of the early days of the Eiffel Tower were all that alluring.
The works of fiction that are extremely entertaining are Alexander McCall Smith's trilogy, Portuguese Irregular Verbs [No. 862], The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs [No. 863], and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances [No. 866]. The trilogy marks moments in the life of Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Iglefeld, the purveyor of all that is known in Portuguese Irregular Verbs, a weighty tome that was the result of the realization that as "[t]he crudities of the modern world were simplifying or even destroying linguistic subtleties." The professor would save the day. McCall's tales, however, are not serious treatises. The three look at the humour of academia. The irrationality of a specialist hanging his hat on one so minuscule point of knowledge, and that as such, honor and awards must befall such a brave intellectual. Academic narcissism is all too prevalent and McCall takes perfect aim with style and grace. I would be the first to find humour in certainty or alleged certainty; and would be the first to take a shot at my own (I just have to remind my self to un-clench the fist when I take the shot). These books are highly recommended; the convergence of events in "The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs" nearly resulted in peeing the bed as I rolled over laughing.
The polar opposite of the above is Chris Hedges latest volume, Empire of Illusion, the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle [No. 0867]. This is a brutal book. A step back to see the flamboyantly frivolous western culture has become...and continues to be directed. And it is so hard to step back when we are travelling at the speed of light, in a ship constructed by "oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite...". The intellectual sphere, born out of the Enlightenment, creator of much of the essence of the moral and ethical structure we hope is there, is continuing to be shattered and torn apart. It is easier to flick the next channel with the remote; it is easier to forgo reason and intellectual rigour for a glittered cardboard world that we are sold. We want others to be devastated by personal mishap. We want the trust broken by the next scandal. And we want it NOW. On our TV and computer screens. We see no reason to remember the past. "Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion." And they are everywhere. If one were to pause for a second and take a step off the train for a moment, would we want our children to live in an world where functional illiteracy becomes closer to the norm than not; or the commercialization of all that is life, and even death has a place on 'social networks'? Or that the word intellectual becomes a pejorative? Can we enjoy and absorb this train ride if we were in control? Or are we just passengers, blindly absorbed in our own belly buttons, occasionally hoping that someone is actually at the helm? Empire of Illusion is a burning book, one that not too long ago in our history would have been just that; burned.
Jesus, Interrupted [No. 0865] by scholar Bart Ehrman is a book about contradictions and reading. The subtitle is "Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them)" and harbors the belief that most people read the Bible in a devotional manner, for that is how it is presented by church leaders. This is a linear reading, one page at a time, or at its worst cherry-picked for the flavor of the day. The historical-critical reading of the Bible, taught in secular seminaries and classes, is one of comparative analysis and literature, and in their original historical context. And there is much to say about the contradictions in the Bible (the separate creation stories for one). Ehrman is careful, however. "I should stress that scholars and students who question such passages are not questioning God himself. They are questioning what the Bible has to say about God." For Ehrman, like many other scholars, the Bible is a human construct, written by many, many authors over centuries of power, wars, and struggles. Ehrman's agnosticism, a growth from a very powerful believer in his youth, is tactful, and passionate. He does not want to offend those who hold the inerrancy of the Bible, but the only critical way to go beyond oneself is to be critical and thoughtful of your own footing. "For me" Ehrman says "it's just one of the mysteries of the universe: how so many people can revere the Bible and think that in it is God's inspired revelation to his people, and yet know so little about it."